Bridgestone Holds G-MEC Opening Ceremony

On April 28 Bridgestone held an opening ceremony for its Global Manufacturing Education Center (G-MEC) in the Bridgestone G-MEC Building, a training building established in Kodaira City, Tokyo. The ceremony, held at the newly opened G-MEC Building, marked the official launch of the new G-MEC training and education programme.

G-MEC was set up in 2007 to train members of Bridgestone’s global workforce involved in its numerous business areas, including the production of tyres, diversified products and processing of raw materials. It is responsible for developing a wide variety of training programmes and educating the instructors who will later pass on their acquired knowledge in each of the tyre maker’s regional locations. Among the training programmes offered are those teaching the fundamentals of manufacturing, including safety and disaster prevention, environmental management, quality management.

As the 4,850 square metre G-MEC Building has been built adjacent to Bridgestone’s Tokyo plant and technical centres in the Kodaira area, the programmes operated there can be based on actual equipment and facilities used in manufacturing, thus giving course participants the opportunity for hands-on training and the use of cutting-edge technologies. Instructors who have finished their education then return to their respective plants around the world and train employees involved in the manufacturing process.

Bridgestone is currently investing in a number of projects in growth areas, such as the erection of a greenfield plant in India, increasing production at the Wuxi Plant in China and the Kitakyushu Plant in Japan. Through the proactive training of employees utilising G-MEC, Bridgestone Corporation is confident of raising manufacturing standards, and says the training will work to further improve its corporate operations from the perspective of both hard and soft elements.